Over the years, computer systems have assumed a growing role in business. Recently, there has been an increase in the use of computers to facilitate provision of certain services over a network, such as the Internet. These services may include, for example, collaborative computing services that enable and manage on-line meetings. The types of services provided may vary from service provider to service provider. Moreover, some on-line service providers provide services of different types.
Commonly, on-line service providers employ a client/server architecture to provide on-line services over a network. In some configurations, such services are provided over the Internet by a server cluster hosted by a service provider. Users of these network services typically connect to the server cluster through the Internet using a conventional web browser, such as Internet Explorer™ by Microsoft Corporation. Other suitable web browsers or applications may alternatively be employed to connect to and exchange data with the server cluster.
After the user has connected to the server cluster, the user may exchange data with the server cluster using the web browser, a native client application, or both. Assuming that the user can establish a connection with the server cluster and can access and use the various services provided by the server cluster with an acceptable degree of latency, the user can properly receive such services.
Occasionally, however, there may be service disruptions. The sources of these disruptions may vary. For example, the network connection between the service provider and the user may be down or may be operating with significant latency. Even if there is an effective network connection, delivery of the on-line services may be impaired by disruptions at the user, at the service provider, or both. In some circumstances, some services may be delivered without disruption, while delivery of other services is significantly impaired.
Conventional systems monitor web site performance by transmitting a browser web page request, such as an HTTP request, and receiving and analyzing the associated HTTP responses. This monitoring, however, is not performed from within a user's local area network (LAN) or from behind a user's firewall, and therefore cannot detect disruptions that are caused, at least in part, to issues unique to the user's LAN or firewall. Thus, monitoring performance of an on-line service from a location other than the user's location may not accurately reveal performance of the on-line service at the user's location.
Users, particularly IT staff of users, frequently need to monitor more than merely the HTTP responses from a web site to effectively monitor the ability of the system to effectively provide the on-line services. For example, where the on-line services include text chat, document sharing, or the like, users need to monitor or measure the performance of these services. By simply monitoring responses to standard HTTP requests, conventional systems are unable to effectively monitor the performance of on-line services.
Further, conventional monitoring systems typically do not monitor or report on usage of the on-line service or services by individual users, and therefore are generally unable to evaluate customer usage of the on-line service or services.
Additionally, these conventional monitoring systems do not monitor actual customer use of one or more on-line services. Hence, information describing such actual customer use is unavailable to customers using such conventional monitoring systems.
Additional background details regarding conventional monitoring systems are disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,511,185, 5,870,559, 5,958,008, 5,974,572, 6,138,157, 6,144,962, 6,205,122, and 6,360,332, the disclosures of all of which are expressly incorporated herein by reference.